Database Resources
The National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System is a long term research and development project (since 1986) designed to "aid the development of systems that help health professionals and researchers retrieve and integrate electronic biomedical information from a variety of sources and to make it easy for users to link disparate information systems, including computer-based patient records, bibliographic databases, factual databases, and expert systems. The UMLS project develops "Knowledge Sources" that can be used by a wide variety of applications programs to overcome retrieval problems caused by differences in terminology and the scattering of relevant information across many databases." Three following items represent some of the databases that apply UMLS research.
- The NLM Gateway: This system allows users to search across MEDLINE/PubMed, OLDMEDLINE, LOCATORplus, MEDLINEplus, ClinicalTrials.gov, DIRLINE, Meeting Abstracts, and HSRProj thus retrieving information from a variety of databases and formats. (All of these databases originate at the NLM.)
- CliniWeb International is maintained by the Oregon Health and Science University and is described as an index and table of contents to clinical information on the World Wide Web. It accepts search terms in five different languages-English, German, Spanish, French and Portuguese.
- Medical Word Search is a Web search service which "aims to develop and maintain a medical thesaurus based search methodology which can provide high quality query expansion for users who wish to quickly locate relevant information."
SUMsearch is maintained by a physician in the medical informatics program at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio. The systems searches the Internet across disparate files, i.e. indexes, journals, books and other documents and emphasizes "evidenced based medicine."
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